Michael Weiss is the Research Director of The Henry Jackson Society, a foreign policy think tank, as well as the co-chair of its Russia Studies Centre. A native New Yorker, he has written widely on English and Russian literature, American culture, Soviet history and the Middle East. Follow @michaeldweiss

Who tried to burn down Ma'an News Agency in Gaza?

Hamas says Gaza's press is free. But "free" has a special meaning for them: journalists are free to do their job, and Hamas is free to harass, intimidate and beat them up for doing it.

On July 10, the offices of Ma’an News Agency – the only independent Palestinian media outlet – were the site of an attempted arson attack. According to the Palestinian Center for Development and Media Freedoms, Ma'an's Gaza correspondent, Ibrahim Mohammed Khalil, discovered on Sunday morning that "a large portion of the door [to Ma'an's newsroom] had been burned down". He also found a "plastic bottle that contained combustible material".

The English language editor of Ma’an, George Hale, is a friend of mine and so I emailed him asking what had happened and who might have tried to immolate his newsroom. Did he suspect Hamas might have had a hand in it? George replied:

Nobody is accusing Hamas of direct involvement. Their police say they are investigating.

But this is not the first attack against our newsroom in Gaza. An improved explosive device was found outside the same building just months ago. (Police said keeping that threat under wraps would help their investigation, but seven months later, they have yet to announce any progress.)

Both attacks followed incitement from Hamas members and affiliated media against Ma’an, including claims we have ties to “Fatah security” and Israel. Earlier this year, the Palestinians journalists’ union urged Hamas to cool the rhetoric, holding them responsible for our journalists’ safety.

It isn’t just the rhetoric that needs cooling.

Last March, for instance, the offices of Reuters in Gaza were raided by about ten men who identified themselves as members of Hamas's internal security services and, in the words of Reuters:

…threatened employees with guns and took away a video camera, apparently after they spotted a reporter filming a demonstration from the building. The men struck one Reuters journalist on the arm with a metal bar and threatened to throw another out of the window of the high-rise block. The group, which numbered about 10 men, smashed a television set and other equipment before leaving.

Hamas's Interior Minister Fathi Hammad denied the Islamist group's involvement and claimed to have arrested and interrogated the assailants. But the offices of CNN and the Japanese news agency NHK were also ransacked by the same gunmen and seemingly for the same motive – because these news organisations had covered Hamas's disruption of unity protests. They also confiscated NHK videotape.

Following these raids, 100 reporters in Gaza staged a sit-in in front of a government building to condemn the wide-scale crackdown on the media. So what did Hamas do? It violently dispersed that assembly as well.

George told me months ago that after the pro-Palestinian "peace campaigner" Vittorio Arrigoni was kidnapped and murdered by a consortium of Salafists – which, as I wrote about at the time, included one active Hamas policeman – a spokesman for the Gaza Interior Ministry, Ihab Ghusein, urged the media to rely on "official information" and not go sniffing around rumours or other leads.

Many, if not most, of the journalists that Hamas targets are themselves Palestinians. One Gazan woman said that both she and her son were threatened with violence if she published anything on Facebook or on her blog about unity demonstrations. According to Ma’an, the woman’s family received a text message from Hamas that read: “We will kill her the next time she blogs against us or uses Facebook to organize anything… If you won't do it, we'll do it for you."

Not that Hamas doesn’t respond to public outcry and condemnation from press rights organisations. Hassen Abu Hasheesh, the head of the party's media office, told journalists in late March that he and Interior Minister Hammad had agreed things had gone too far. From now on, Hasheesh said, there’d be no “beating, cursing, insulting or chasing the journalists or raiding their offices without due legal justification.”

Who says Islamists aren't respectful of democracy and the rule of law?